A teenage boy was dead, his crumpled bicycle still lying underneath a van at the South Side intersection where he was struck by a speeding car shortly before 2 a.m. A few blocks away, off-duty Chicago police Officer Richard Bolling had been stopped driving the wrong way down a one-way street, the windshield of his Dodge Charger smashed and splattered with blood. The patrol officers smelled alcohol on his breath and found an open bottle of beer in the console.

If it were a typical fatal DUI investigation, the driver would be promptly asked to consent to field sobriety tests and a breath test.

But with an off-duty cop involved, Lt. John Brundage decided to order the patrol officers to hold off on testing Bolling until a higher-ranking commander arrived, leaving the officer to sober up in the back of the police car as crucial minutes ticked by that early morning in May 2009. Two hours after the crash, Bolling was given a field sobriety test. He wasn't ordered to take a breath test until almost three hours after the field test.

It was a decision Brundage now regrets.

"Frankly, in hindsight, I probably should've proceeded (with the field sobriety tests)," Brundage, who is now retired, said in a Tribune interview. "But everything else, we were doing it by the book."

Last month a Cook County jury found Bolling, 42, a veteran narcotics officer, guilty of aggravated DUI, reckless homicide and leaving the scene of a fatal accident in the death of Trenton Booker, 13. At Bolling's scheduled sentencing Wednesday at the Criminal Courts Building, Judge Matthew Coghlan has a wide range of options. He could impose anything from probation up to 15 years in prison.

Prosecutors alleged Brundage and other officers at the scene had given Bolling preferential treatment because he was a cop. Brundage was the lone officer disciplined for neglect of duty, according to the department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Tribune.

Even though court records and trial testimony raised questions about how the officers handled the investigation, department officials said they had no plans to re-examine what happened.

University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman said the fatal crash illustrates deep flaws in the way police handle cases involving their own. He said an internal affairs investigator — who had the authority to order Bolling to take a breath test — should have been on the scene within minutes.

"The first order of business in a death investigation is to preserve evidence. In this case, you have evidence that's going to go away incredibly quickly," Futterman said. "Why hours passed before an internal affairs investigator came to the scene is evidence of … a completely broken system for investigating police misconduct."

In the Tribune interview, Brundage said he was "personally insulted" by the prosecution's allegations of favoritism and contended his delay to involve the highest-ranking officer on duty at the time — called the incident commander — wasn't an attempt to buy time for Bolling. It was just the opposite, he said.

"I thought the proper way to handle it was to wait until the on-duty incident commander arrived on the scene so he can witness our investigation and ensure that we weren't giving the off-duty police officer any special breaks and that we were conducting a proper investigation," Brundage said.

He said he notified the department's main dispatching center, which then contacted the incident commander. What he didn't realize was that the incident commander was on the Northwest Side and that it would take him about an hour to drive to the crash site.

Brundage admitted the investigation would have gone much faster had the suspect in the case been a civilian. He would not have felt compelled to call the incident commander and his own presence might not even be necessary.

"We wouldn't have waited. … The on-duty incident commander wouldn't have responded to the scene," he said. "In fact, probably the police officers would've just proceeded without even the sergeant appearing on the scene."

According to a timeline of events compiled by the Tribune based on court records and trial testimony, Bolling was stopped at 82nd Street and Winchester Avenue at 1:31 a.m., just four minutes after the first 911 call about the crash a few blocks away at 81st Street and Ashland Avenue.

Much of what transpired over the next several hours was captured on the dashboard camera of the squad car where Bolling had been placed under arrest.

According to a court filing, shortly after 2 a.m., an undisclosed superior officer leaned into the car and said to Bolling, "We're going to have to give you the standard field sobriety test. ... I'm gonna try to help you out as much as possible, the lieutenant's on the scene."